Dodgers Magic

Last night, Magic Johnson became the public face of an ownership group that will spend two billion dollars to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers. An immediate reaction to the headlines: Magic Johnson has two billion dollars?

Well, no. Financially speaking, Johnson is a smaller fish in a group of businessmen who have elected to buy the team. Among them: the guy who produced “Rain Man” and “The Color Purple.” The controlling owner, meaning the guy who put in the most money, will be Mark Walter, the C.E.O. of Guggenheim Partners, a Chicago and New York based money-making machine. It was a shrewd move acquiring Johnson, the guy who likely contributed as many smiles as dollars to the deal. It’s hard to imagine Dodgers fans getting excited over the news that their team is being taken over by the head of a financial-services firm without the addition of the former director of Showtime.

Whoever is paying for the bulk of the transaction, the total amount of money changing hands is staggering: more than twice the record price for any other Major League Baseball franchise. In fact, it’s more than anyone’s paid for any team, ever. In 2009, the Miami Dolphins cost $1.1 billion; abroad, Manchester United went for $1.47 billion. (CNBC’s sports-business guru Darren Rovell priced the Yankees, in context of the Dodgers sale, at over $5 billion, and the Dallas Cowboys at $7 billion.) All this for a team—a historic team, admittedly—with a creaking stadium and only four playoff appearances in the past fifteen seasons.

Regardless, the timing is good for baseball, affirming its financial value in the face of the N.F.L. juggernaut, and putting an end to one of two ownership sagas that overshadowed everything else in baseball’s offseason. The nightmares in L.A. and Queens, the latter of which remains unresolved, practically made us forget that Albert Pujols, the best hitter in the game, switched teams, and leagues, to join the Angels. It so happens that the Dodgers announcement also falls on the same day that the Seattle Mariners and Oakland Athletics began baseball’s regular season with the first of two games in Tokyo, finally bringing the sport out of the board room and back onto the field.

Photograph by Allen Berezovsky/Getty Images.

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